ABOUT US

Steve Friess is a 2011-12 recipient of the prestigious Knight-Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan, where he will be studying the impact of the rapid expansion of Vegas-style gaming on Asia. He's a podcaster, author and Vegas-based freelance journalist who writes regularly for USA Today, The New York Times, Newsweek and many others. His column, "The Strip Sense" appears every Thursday in the Las Vegas Weekly. His books include "Gay Vegas" from Huntington Press and Knopf Mapguides' "Las Vegas."Friess co-hosts the weekly celebrity interview podcast The Strip Podcast "The Strip" with his husband, Miles Smith, the executive producer at KSNV-TV, Channel 3. For four years, Steve also co-hosted The Petcast with Las Vegas Sun education scribe Emily Richmond.

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Tuesday, May 22, 2007

I interviewed Las Vegas Sands Inc. COO and president Bill Weidner for a while today for a few longer-term stories, but I asked about Kirk Kerkorian's bid to buy Bellagio and CityCenter. One real possibility is that MGM Mirage could be sold off piece by piece, so I asked him if the owner of the Venetian and Palazzo would want, say, Mirage and Treasure Island -- the stuff across the street. His intriguing response:

"It all depends on what the values might be. We have lots of our eggs in Asia, we have lots of growth coming out of Asia. We think there will be more venues to develop in Asia. We want to position ourselves to be the people for those types of developments. Our fundamental strategy still remains filling the pipeline with future development and building our value from the ground up."

So it's sort of a "sure, maybe." But if it was a definite "no" or even unlikely, he would've clearly said so. Can you just imagine what a stick-in-the-eye it would be if Sheldon Adelson ended up controlling the Mirage, the groundbreaker that arch-enemy Steve Wynn built? Man, that would be cruel.

The audio of this interview will go up later this week in the podcast feed. Weidner talks in detail about Macau, about Palazzo, about why they knew the Las Vegas Monofail wouldn't work and about why Adelson gets the smallest salary of any Strip bosses. If you're not already subscribed through iTunes, click here and join the party.

THE STRIP FINALE

Below are links to the final episodes and last week of special editions of The Strip Podcast. Right-click on any of these to save and hear at your leisure. Otherwise, click on them and they should play. Enjoy, and thanks for the wonderful years.